''John Marr and Other Sailors'' is a volume of poetry published by

Herman Melville Herman Melville (Name change, born Melvill; August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American people, American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance (literature), American Renaissance period. Among his bes ...

in 1888. Melville published twenty-five copies at his own expense, indicating that they were intended for family and friends. Henry Chapin wrote in an introduction to a reprint that "Melville's loveable freshness of personality is everywhere in evidence, in the voice of a true poet".Chapin, Henry. Introduction ''John Marr & Other Poems''. Kindle ebook ASIN B0084B7NOC The "Inscription Epistolary" is to

William Clark Russell William Clark Russell (24 February 18448 November 1911) was an English writer best known for his nautical novels. At the age of 13 Russell joined the United Kingdom's Merchant Navy (United Kingdom), Merchant Navy, serving for eight years. The h ...

, a British sea-story author who called Melville "the greatest genius the nited Stateshas produced" and "first" among the "poets of the deep". Like ''

Timoleon Timoleon (Ancient Greek language, Greek: wikt:Τιμολέων, Τιμολέων), son of Timodemus, of Ancient Corinth, Corinth (c. 411–337 BC) was a Greek statesman and general. As a brilliant general, a champion of Greece against Anci ...

'', his other volume of late verse, scholars have assumed that it was a "private work of art", symptomatic of his withdrawal from the literary world. Melville was putting this collection together as he was also drafting '' Billy Budd'', which, like several poems in this collection, had prose headnotes followed by full poems.

The poems

The poems include "John Marr", "Bridegroom Dick", "Tom Deadlight", "Jack Roy", "The Haglets", "The Æolian Harp", "To the Master of the 'Meteor'", "Far off-Shore", "The Man-of-War Hawk", "The Figure-Head", "The Good Craft 'Snow-Bird'", "Old Counsel", "The Tuft of Kelp", "The Maldive Shark", "To Ned", "Crossing the Tropics", "The Berg", "The Enviable Isles", and "Pebbles I-VII". The critic

F. O. Matthiessen Francis Otto Matthiessen (February 19, 1902 – April 1, 1950) was an educator, scholar and literary critic influential in the fields of American literature and American studies. His best known work, ''American Renaissance: Art and Expression in ...

finds an "oblique parable" to the bleakness of Melville's own later years in the title poem, "John Marr". In it, Marr, an old sailor, has left the "vastness of the sea for the vastness of the prairies". Melville's preface to the poem says that the pioneers there were "kindly", but "staid" and "sincerely, however narrowly, religious". They lacked "the free-and-easy tavern clubs ... in certain old and comfortable seaport towns", and were lacking "geniality, the flower of life springing from some sense of joy in it". But when Marr tried to enliven the occasion with a story of his adventures at sea, the blacksmith honestly said to him: "Friend, we know nothing of that here".

References

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Notes

External links

''John Marr and Other Sailors'': An Online Electronic ‘Facsimile’ Text of the First Edition (1888) DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
American poetry collections {{poetry-stub